Smaller Particle Accelerators

While the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) continues to get the majority of buzz in particle physics news stories (anticipated to start back up in October or so), new research being done in the BELLA (BErkeley Lab LAser) program at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory may show such large-scale particle accelerators to be obsolete ... or at least cost prohibitive. (Austria announced plans to drop out of CERN involvement, but then changed their mind, bringing up concerns that other nations might start looking to CERN and LHC funding as an optional expense that could be trimmed or re-allocated in their budget debates.)

The new particle accelerators are being designed and tested as part of the BELLA program, which use a series of lasers to accelerate particles over a span of inches, rather than the miles needed in traditional particle accelerators. Though the "big boy" particle accelerators are still much more powerful, using the BELLA-style accelerators in serial (one after the other) could get particles going nearly as fast in a much shorter period of time, allowing for some similar tests to be run in a much smaller facility.

Other proposals have been made in the past, such as desktop plasma-based accelerators. It remains to be seen which of these proposals will prove most viable.